


Space Oddity

by shibbledibble_writes



Category: Invader Zim
Genre: Action/Adventure, Eventual Romance, Eventual ZADF - Freeform, Friendship, Gen, Learning to be Human, More tags to be added, Not ZADR, Slow Burn, This is mostly going to be about friendship and adventure though, ZADF, rating will eventually go up
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-03
Updated: 2019-09-03
Packaged: 2020-10-06 15:49:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20509535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shibbledibble_writes/pseuds/shibbledibble_writes
Summary: In Plague of Babies, the Nhar Gh'ok abducted a whole maternity ward worth of babies. Well what if that happened a few years earlier? 20 years after the Nhar Gh'ok's mistake, Zilena is coming home to Earth and she's going to wedge herself right between Zim and Dib's rivalry. A tough place to be, when you're trying to learn how to be human.





	Space Oddity

“Don’t Panic.”  
\-- Douglas Adams, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Dib doesn’t have Mr. Adams in mind while he is repeating his quote inwardly like a mantra. It wasn’t everyday that an alien dropped out of the sky in a ship made of pointy, pink metal, and down into your town park at 2:24 am. It was even less common that the alien would then try to convince you that she was actually born on Earth.

He pictures leaving. He pictures going home, crawling into bed and under his blankets so that he may tend to the fever dream he was so obviously suffering from. He wouldn’t do any of those things though, because he was Dib. That is why he stood here now, teetering between his steely determination to protect the Earth from supernatural threats, and a massive panic attack.

“Will you lend me your assistance, or won’t you?” She’s curt with him, watching him from down her nose with her chin tilted up. She looks human. Yes, besides the fact that she was standing in the mouth of a hulking, magenta spaceship with the Irken insignia emblazoned on the side, she does look quite human.

She has pale, wolfish eyes on a background of porcelain, and all the ashy blonde hair that she hadn’t drawn back into her ponytail hugs her cheeks in choppy curls. She was a small thing, he could tell even from here, and she stood stiffly turned halfway towards him and halfway towards the inside of her ship, as if braced for an attack. She tied it all together nicely with a dangerous and also unimpressed look that told him ‘I’m slightly disgusted by you, but I’m not so disgusted that I’ll leave.’ So, like a typical human girl in his experience.

He would say that she is pretty, if he were honest. Pretty, however, in the same kind of way that a well-crafted blade could be pretty. Alright to look at, but you’re also sure it could easily kill you if you weren’t careful.

None of this helps the fact that he doesn’t trust her. Tak had slipped by him with no suspicion, her disguise had been flawless. Dib had thought she was pretty, and it came closer to costing him his planet in that once instance than most of Zim’s entire mission on Earth.

Dib would feel a little remiss if he let his world get almost destroyed again. No, he didn’t feel like doing that.

“I... don’t think I can help you.” He tells her quietly, shifting nervously on his feet as he does. She blinks at him, and Dib can’t help but chew his lip in the silence.

“That is fine.” She declares after a beat, and begins to toe forward, down the ramp that leads up to her ship. Dib takes two steps in the direction of out of her way, and lets her pass.

Dib notices two things right then about the girl. The first thing he notices is that holy cow, she is actually much shorter than she looked standing in her ship. Like, wow she’s almost Zim sized-- what is she? Five feet on the dot? The second realization he has is that there’s something amiss about her PAK. That is to say, it was missing.

Dib knew a bit about PAKs-- had a much more intimate understanding of them than he desired. A nasty ordeal with Zim’s had taught him everything he needed to know about them. Firstly, that they weren’t to be toyed with. Secondly, that they were there for greater purposes than summoning extra legs or a walkie talkie. Irkens need them to live, just as much as humans need their brains, and a PAK is basically an Irken brain.

It would seem a little irresponsible for anybody to be walking around without their brain.

Without hesitation, Dib quietly reaches out and waves his hand over the empty space of her back before she can get too far away. There is truly nothing there, he discovers, and although he feels shocked, he’s not sure which conclusion would have been more shocking. It is no illusion, though, and she hasn’t cloaked it. She had simply been telling the truth, and he is willing to admit it.

“So hold on, wait. Tell me how you ended up on Irk again?” He watches her take a seat on the nearest park bench and lifts a brow at her. “Also what are you doing?”

She blinks, but her eyes stay pointed forward and her lips stay shut. Dib feels one corner of his mouth twitch back towards his cheek, irritation rising with every passing moment that she doesn’t answer.

“Hello?”

“Hello,” She repeats back to him. “Please give me a moment. My translator isn’t instantaneous.”

Oh. That explains why their conversation felt like it was on a delay. It was on a delay. He waits patiently as she gathers her words, and now he sees how the gears are spinning away inside her mind. She flicks her pale eyes, which he can now recognize as green, back towards him when she is ready.

“First, what I am doing is I am going to sit here and plan my next move. I intend to stay on Earth, irregardless to your unwillingness to assist me. I do not know how to start here, but it is no matter. I will solve it myself.” She waves her hand flippantly over her last words, like figuring life out on Earth should be so easy. Dib can’t help but wonder if Irkens are just like this. It was uncanny how much she reminded him of Zim-- his mannerisms, his pattern of speech, almost right down to his haughty ‘I’m better than you’ facial expression.

He pictures a pair of antennae sitting on top of her head, and thinks they would be oddly fitting. The strange not-alien girl seems to take his silence as a satisfactory answer and continues.

“I don’t see why I need to repeat myself, regarding your first question. Unless you weren’t listening?”

She’s got him there. He hadn’t paid attention to her story when she first landed. He’d been preoccupied, too busy believing she was an Irken to listen to what he presumed had been bullshit at the time.

“Let’s just say that you’re totally right, and I wasn’t.”

Her expression sours after a beat and she huffs with mild exasperation once the words catch up with her. Dib realizes he can’t help but be amused by the delay-- watching every word register was kind of fun. He fights back against a smile.

“Very well.”

They find themselves sharing the bench as she tells her story. She tells him of Irken Invader Diz, a name that Dib can see she holds in reverence. Invader Diz had rescued her, she says. After being displaced halfway across the galaxy with over a dozen other infants, the Nhar Gh’ok never suspected they beamed up children instead of their scouting party. They had taken the children back to their homeworld, and experimented on them-- tried to turn them back into the Nhar Gh’ok that they never were.

She tells him that she is the sole survivor. Many of the unnamed children had died from the Nhar Gh’ok’s tampering, but the rest were lost in the organic sweep. Invader Diz had chosen to save her-- take her to raise as her own.

She stops there, and there’s a painful kind of look on her face that tells Dib there’s more to the story. He resolves not to press.

“That is how I ended up on Irk.” She concludes, and Dib wonders what it must have been like to grow up on a planet full of Irkens. Zim and Tak were his only experience with Irkens, and he couldn’t imagine living with them. Maybe he was just biased or something because they both tried to destroy his homeworld and Zim was, in fact, still trying to destroy his homeworld.

“You may be wondering how I found Earth?” She adds after a moment.

“Probably something to do with Zim?” He suggests, and watches her face light up with recognition as soon as the little Irken’s name leaves his mouth. His reputation precedes him, Dib sees. “No way, really?”  
“Yes way, really.” She confirms, pulling something resembling a phone out of her pocket. She taps with wild abandon at its screen, going through pages of alien text that he doesn’t understand. “Even more interesting though is this.”

She turns the phone around and taps the screen with a gloved finger. He feels his mind short-circuit for a moment, almost refusing to register what he was seeing.

A picture. It’s of him. Well, it was more of a picture of Zim than it was a picture of Dib-- Dib was in the background.

‘Now this is weird,’ is Dib’s first thought, because he can actually remember when this would have been taken. He’d snuck up on Zim during one of his calls to his Almighty Tallest, hoping to listen in on a mission report. This had to be taken from the other end of the call-- he never realized he was in sight of the camera.

“That is you, is it not?” She taps the screen again under his image. His image, in all of his failing-to-be-stealthy glory.

“Uhhh, yep. Yeah. That’s me alright. Say how did you know how to find me, anyways?” The capabilities of competent Irkens were something to truly behold-- maybe there really was something to Zim’s bragging about Irken superiority.

“I wasn’t trying to find you.” she explains, and expertly dashes his budding admiration. “I followed Invader Zim’s coordinates. Your planet exists deep into uncharted space. I did not know there were other humans until I saw this picture-- I never even had a word for what I was. My only tether to this place is that odious little invader.”

She slips the not-quite-a-phone back into her pocket and Dib has to hide his glee that this absolute stranger seems to hate Zim just as much as he does.

“You and me meeting is a coincidence,” she continues, “albeit not an unpleasant one. If I may ask, why are you here? This place is abandoned except for you.” She flicks a hand out to gesture to the empty park around them. The only light they have is between the moon and the streetlamps.

“Your vessel ID pinged on Tak’s ship-- my ship’s radar. I came to the park to meet you,” he decides to leave out the part about how he planned to pour his bottle of water on her to make her leave, “but you didn’t come down until a little while ago.”

“I see. Yes, I was waiting until the park was empty, but clearly it was not as empty as I believed. If I may ask, how long have you been waiting here?” She quirks a curious brow at him, and Dib finds his eyes darting away under her gaze.

“I, uh, headed out pretty much as soon as I saw the ping.” he admits, scratching uncomfortably at the stubble on his chin. He hadn’t done a stake out like that since Zim’s first couple of years on Earth and how it wore on him now. ‘Oh god,’ Dib frets inwardly ‘am I getting old?’

“... That kind of diligence is impressive coming from a civilian.” Her commendation cuts through his peek into the brevity of life and he turns his attention back to her. She’s giving him the smallest of smiles.

Suddenly Dib is reconsidering his earlier position. He’s confident that this change of heart has nothing to do with validation-- he would help her purely out of his own natural instinct for good. She does need help, after all. She could get hurt on her own.

“You know, I just realized I never got your name. I’m Dib, by the way.” He sticks his hand out for a handshake, and concedes his mistake when she thrusts her own hand out awkwardly into the air, mimicking the gesture without knowing how to follow through.

“My name is Zilena.”

**Author's Note:**

> Aaaand it's here! So excited to get this out and started! This is pretty much my first solo project. For more information about Zilena you can find it on my tumblr, shibbledibble, or you can follow this link! ----> https://shibbledibble.tumblr.com/post/187199786465/let-me-tell-you-about-my-invader-zim-oc-were
> 
> Also the song of the chapter (why not make this a thing?): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0Mz_IqpZX8


End file.
